This report is focused around Lost and Found data using the intakes and outcomes data received for 2019-2021 (up to August). Its goal is to reflect everything we could learn about L&F from the available data, make sure the numbers we see make sense, and highlight things that would be useful to show but some/all data required for them are missing.

Date range: 2019-01-01 to 2021-10-31

In addition, 2017-2018 data had both found and home address locations for RTH animals, which made it possible to analyze how far from home these animals were found.

Report Structure

  1. KPIs: data points that indicate how good the shelter is doing on on L&F. They have numeric goals associated with them.
  2. Supporting data: data points that aren’t a goal themselves but serve as a proxy for improving a goal. For example, the method of RTH is not a performance indicator, but it helps identifying how RTHs take place. The number of strays found per ZIP code is not a metric to improve, but it shows where most strays are coming from to guide resource allocation.
  3. Data notes: the state of the data received from the shelter.
  4. Extra metrics: some ideas for additional L&F metrics and the data points they require.

Scroll down or use the table of contents on the left to navigate throughout the document. Most sections contain multiple tabs showing different facets of a data type. Most plots are interactive, meaning they include tooltips and allow hiding and showing parts and zooming in and out. If something went wrong, look for the house icon in the top right corner of each figure to reset.

KPIs

Yearly RTH Rates by Species

This section provides an overview of the RTH rate per year divided by species.

Overall RTH Rate

This table covers all strays and RTHs. Animals younger than 4 weeks are excluded from stray and RTH calculations. RTH rates shown below are the number of strays with RTO outcome out of all strays.

When we go over this, let’s make sure we calculate the rate the same way you do, so we would want to make sure what we see makes sense. If these numbers are right, they are lower than the national and HASS averages, which are at 30% RTH rate (for dogs) and slightly lower for cats (3%). It seems like there was a slight improvement from 2019 to 2020 but a decline in 2021 (12 to 14 to 9%).

Species Year Strays RTH_Count RTH_Rate
Cat 2019 6442 109 0.02
Cat 2020 4451 78 0.02
Cat 2021 4355 44 0.01
Dog 2019 9564 1127 0.12
Dog 2020 5611 771 0.14
Dog 2021 5408 472 0.09
Other 2019 3110 2 0.00

Field RTH Rate

This one only counts animals who came in as strays from the field, which is anything that has ‘ACO’ in the intake subtype, which is primarily ACO Pickup / Drop Off (there are 73 animals with ACO Drop Off / Ear Tipped also included). Normally, we would then split these by RTH method between RTO in the field and in the shelter, but here we will just look at the RTH rate as a whole since this is not practiced at PVAS at the moment.

Like the overall rate, there has been a big improvement in 2020 onwards, but numbers are lower than the overall ones, which suggests the RTH rates for public drop offs would be higher.

Species Year Strays RTH_Count RTH_Rate
Cat 2019 5737 99 0.02
Cat 2020 3692 70 0.02
Cat 2021 3657 35 0.01
Dog 2019 8756 1046 0.12
Dog 2020 5066 733 0.14
Dog 2021 4798 424 0.09
Other 2019 3081 2 0.00

Shelter RTH Rate

This shows the numbers only for strays that were public drop offs. We can see that the rates for these have been consistently lower than those picked up in the field across all three years for which we have data for. This hasn’t often been the case for other shelters.

Species Year Strays RTH_Count RTH_Rate
Cat 2019 645 7 0.01
Cat 2020 732 8 0.01
Cat 2021 643 9 0.01
Dog 2019 757 67 0.09
Dog 2020 539 38 0.07
Dog 2021 514 25 0.05

RTH Over Time

These three time series show the RTH rate per month, to show whether there were times with particularly high or low rates as well as the overall trajectory.

In 2019 and 2020, most months are around the average yearly values, but there are some peak months – both Januaries and July to September 2020. 2021 has been fairly consistent and with a lower average as reflected in the table above.

Overall RTH

Field RTH

This is the same figure, but only counting field strays (again, anything marked as ACO pick up). Looks pretty similar to the overall trend, as these are the majority of animals.

Shelter RTH

This figure only counts strays who were public drop offs. They are generally lower, but except for the similar peaks in January there are also two high months recently - May and September 2021. Might be worth talking about these when we go over this. From the figure below, it seems like September had fewer stray intakes than usual (which might have helped?), but May was standard.

Stray Intakes

This section shows the number of stray intakes over time, as well as the breakdown of strays by field/shelter intake.

Stray Intakes by Month

Stray Intake Subtypes

90% of animals come from ACO drop offs. Except for the first two values, the others are rarely in use – are they new or legacy values?

Length of Stay Differences - RTH v. Other Outcomes

The average difference in length of stay (in days) between strays with RTH outcomes and all other strays is shown in the table below – roughly 20 days for dogs and 24 for cats when looking at the average. Since the average might be skewed by some animals staying for a very long time, the median is included as well, and there the differences are 9 days for dogs and 13 for cats.

That means that every successful RTH saves 9 days of care on average at PVAS, and field RTH would save an extra day or two on average for RTH from the shelter. This could translate to pretty significant cost savings at scale – assuming a daily cost of care of 20$, if the RTH rate for dogs were 25% (reuniting an extra 2715 dogs across the almost 3 years of data), it would have saved PVAS about $4.88710^{5} in costs of care (this is a fairly simple calculation, but it gets at the magnitude of the potential benefits).

Species Outcome Count Average_Length_Of_Stay Median_Length_Of_Stay
Cat Other Outcomes 10137 26.70 14
Cat RTO 231 2.77 1
Dog Other Outcomes 17916 22.14 10
Dog RTO 2370 2.40 1

Supporting Data

Stray Intake and RTH By Found Location

The following maps show stray intake and RTH rate by Census tracts to highlight geographical patterns. The first and second tab are similar to previous metrics; the third tab, RTH Gap, shows the number of strays who were not returned home per census tract.

The data in this section covers only 2021 and includes stray dogs for which found addresses were present. Animals with the shelter’s address (and anything on its street) were excluded as well. After this filtering, the data below (number of strays, rate of RTH, RTH gap) is shown for 9776 strays of which 524 were RTH.

However, a key obstacle was that almost half the addresses had no ZIP code or an indication of a municipality, i.e. just a street name and number, which meant their geocoding was much more error prone. I attached ‘Hidalgo County’ to all of those, but it could have still misidentified their location. Thus, the next section will show the same maps without these animals, which means only 5054 animals will be mapped. One clear result of that is that the area that seems quite rural and yet with most animals (24301) in these maps does not have as many intakes anymore.

Stray Intake

RTH Rate

RTH Gap

This combines the other two tabs to highlight where most additional RTH potential exists.

Stray Intake and RTH By Found Location – Higher Confidence

As mentioned above, these are the same maps but showing only addresses that were fairly precise. One clear result of that is that 24301 is not as central anymore.

Stray Intake

RTH Rate

RTH Gap

This combines the other two tabs to highlight where most additional RTH potential exists.

Census Data

This map shows different demogrpahic information for Hidalgo County.

Distances Traveled by Lost Dogs - 2017-2018

This section uses the outcome files received for years 2017 and 2018, because they include both a found location AND an outcome address for each animal, unlike the more recent files we have (for which an outcome address was never requested, so it makes sense it is not there). These two data points mean we could find out how far away do dogs go from home when they get lost (and are found).

Across both these years, there were 848 strays who had an RTO outcome. Out of those, 764 dogs had usable addresses for both found and outcome locations, after excluding addresses that could not be easily converted to a precise location (common themes: ‘mile X of road Y’, ‘see memo’, ‘local canal’, or a missing value). For each dog, the listed intake address and owner addresses were geocoded (using Google’s geolocation service), and then the distance between the two points was calculated. Some addresses were geocoded incorrectly and were removed, as were dogs with a distance of more than 40 miles between the two points, which were few. Some of these can be corrected if needed. This filtering left a total of 704 dogs.

The distribution of distances is shown in the following figure.

Of these 704 dogs, 51% were found less than a mile away from home, and half of those (25% of all dogs) were found less than a block away from home. 20% of all dogs were found more than 5 miles away.

Distance.Category Num.Animals Ratio
5+ Miles 136 19.3%
1-5 Miles 209 29.7%
More than a Block, Less than 1 Mile 183 26%
Up to a Block 176 25%

Data Notes

  1. 450 of the 9337 stray animals did not have a ZIP code listed. 130 had no value, while the rest had written values (‘outside Baltimore’).

  2. Out of all strays in 2021, only 13 did not have a found location listed – which is great! Also, there were 130 animals with the shelter’s address as their address, which is not a high percentage.

  3. However, about 1/3 of these animals only had a street name and number noted, without an indication of ZIP code or municipality, which might have led to some misidentifications. I added ‘Hidalgo County’ to identify these, and most addresses returned a result that looked in the right area, but that is a potential limitation. 215 animals had no street number or intersection at all so they were excluded.

  4. Intake subtype had several values that were in very unfrequent use.

  5. Outcome subtype – clarify use of Surrender RTO vs Stray Reclaim on

  6. Since return in field is being put to practice now with two municipalities, it is worth capturing that in the outcome subtype for RTH.

Extra Metrics

Other things we could show if we had the data for it:

  1. Exact distances traveled by lost dogs from home for more recent years.
  2. Prevalence of microchips across town (for example, are there areas from which more animals come in without chips?) and the RTH rates for animals found with/without chips, if there is a field indicating microchip scan results upon intake.
  3. Reclaim fees (could be a yes/no to track fee waiving).
  4. Number of public found reports and successful RTH by the public (if this data is accessible to the shelter).

Thanks for reading through, and we’re looking forward to talking through it and thinking about more ways to make this data useful for you.